Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read and comment on my previous post regarding dropping coverage of Public Performance Licenses at http://www.prn.bc.ca/ts/?p=1904.
We can now show video with an educational purpose in classrooms with the new changes to the Copyright Act without license so we will no longer be covering PPLs.
One school had identified that the loss of PPLs would impact their ability to fundraise by showing videos and charging admission.
As Technology Services Learning Resource budget is meant to cover district wide licenses it should not be used to cover the cost for one school. The function of our Learning Resource budget is to cover districtwide educational and business licenses. The PPLs would be used for non-educational and non-district business purposes and therefore it is no longer an appropriate expenditure from our Learning Resources budget. The cost savings as a result will offset other software licensing costs in the district.
It would require 6 to 8 schools wanting the PPLs to make financial sense to purchase centrally. Even then the dollars would need to be found from other budgets or cost recovery from the groups/schools. Schools who wish to show video for non-educational purposes may do so provided they acquire their own licenses. I have included cost information in the comments of the original post linked above. I have contact information for the companies as well which schools can get from me via email if interested.